According to the state of the art, different individually packaged products are stored in a warehouse in bays at a certain location, sorted by kinds. When placing a commissioning order of a customer, the desired goods or individually packaged products are removed manually by an operator or, for example, at a wholesale dealer, automatically in a commissioning unit from the destination site in the warehouse and fed to a transport container, for example, a tub. The tub preferably contains the products of a complete commissioning order, is guided to a shipping area and from there is finally transported to the customer.
The difficulty lies in guaranteeing that the correct products were assigned to each commissioning order. In order to guarantee this, each order must be checked.
One possibility of checking is, for example, weighing an empty and a filled container in case of a commissioning order and calculating the total weight of the filled container from the known individual weights of the individually packaged products besides the known empty weight of the container. However, many different individually packaged products often have approximately the same weight, so that the weighing method is only conditionally reliable. If there is no difference, in weighing, between the set weight and the actual weight of a commissioning order, then the correct composition of a desired commissioning order cannot hence be absolutely concluded. If there is a difference between the set weight and the actual weight, then the error is unknown for the most part and can often be eliminated only with difficulty by all individual products of the container having to be taken once more from the container and checked manually in order to determine definitively which product is missing or if too much is present. This means not only a tremendous expenditure of time, but also a high cost factor, which is reflected, if nothing else, in the price of the product.
To lower costs and expense, according to the state of the art, the products or individually packaged products are provided with a bar code beforehand, i.e., still before storing the individually packaged products in the warehouse. The thus identified individually packaged products are taken from the container for checking and fed manually to a reading device or a hand scanner, which is capable of identifying the product by the bar code. It is understood that such an identification process is nevertheless expensive.
In order to recognize a large number of individually packaged products comparatively quickly for the purpose of optionally introducing corrective measures, the “check station” mentioned in the introduction, whose conveying track, which has a V-shaped cross section, is a diagonal chute, on which the individually packaged products, fed manually separately, slide through a scanning tunnel because of their gravity and are hereby read and checked and are possibly subsequently sorted out, is known from DE 102 09 864 A1. However, it was shown that the sliding speed is undefined and limited, and a reliable centering in the V angle of the chute and reliable multidimensional scanning in case of high throughput of individually packaged products are only conditionally possible.